Showing posts with label networking. Show all posts
Showing posts with label networking. Show all posts

Feb 17, 2010

State of the Art - Buzzing, Tweeting and Carping

Funny, isn’t it? The people who review gadgets generally aren’t the people who buy them.

After all, whom would you hire to write your tech column, Average Joe Consumer or someone with advanced technical skills?

Exactly. So tech reviewers tend to be devotees, the people who get sweaty-palmed at the thought of 64-bit addressing and multiband radios — not members of the target audience, the 300 million who will actually spend money on these things. That’s why tech blogs often savage easy-to-use products that become huge hits (the Flip camera), but adore more technical products that would overwhelm normal people (Linux).

All of this brings us to Buzz, the new Twitter wannabe from Google.

Google Buzz Test, but not work...Image by hsuanwei via Flickr

At its heart, Twitter is dead simple: you type little messages into the box at Twitter.com — news, jokes, observations. Your messages show up on the screens of your followers, whoever’s signed up to receive them.

That simplicity has made Twitter a huge hit. But “simple” usually means “limited,” and Twitter is no exception. Your messages can’t be longer than 140 characters. There’s no text formatting. You can’t paste in photos or videos. There’s no filtering of messages. No way to rank or rate people or their utterances. No way to send messages out to canned groups of people, like Family or Co-workers.

Google Buzz overcomes all of that. It’s a lot like Twitter (with huge helpings of FriendFeed.com thrown in), but there’s no length limit on your messages. You can search for messages, give certain ones a “thumbs up” (you click a button labeled Like as you do in Facebook). You can forward messages by e-mail. Comments and replies to a certain post remain attached to it, clumped together as a conversation. You can link to your Flickr, Picasa or YouTube accounts, making it easy to drop a photo or a video link into a Buzz posting.

You can also post messages to your Buzz account by e-mail, which is great when you’re on the move.

That feature works only if you send the message from your Gmail account, which brings up a huge Buzz point: it’s deeply intertwined with Gmail, Google’s free e-mail service. In fact, Buzz is an icon nestled right in there between Inbox and Sent Mail. So you need a Gmail account to use Buzz. No problem, unless you feel that Google has its paws on way too much of the world’s personal information already.

And if you are, in fact, a privacy fanatic, Google Buzz may not be the social-networking tool for you. The service’s introduction last week caused a ripple of horror through the paranoia-inclined.

Yahoo Buzz or Google Buzz?Image by Máximo Gómez Santos via Flickr

See, on Twitter, when you first start out, you’re not “following” anyone at all, which would make it a very silent, boring place. So when you sign up, Twitter shows a list of current members with a track record of being funny or interesting — a starter set of people to follow.

Google decided to go that one better: it would automatically sign you up to follow the people you communicate with most often on Gmail or Google Chat.

Unfortunately, that meant that anyone —friends, enemies, perfect strangers — could see whom you communicate with most often, just by examining your Buzz profile page.

Google worked furiously over the weekend; in several waves of updates, it fixed the privacy holes and wrote apologetic blog posts. Now when you sign up, Google merely suggests people you might want to follow; you have to approve or reject the suggestions. It’s also much easier to turn off Buzz completely with one click.

So no, Buzz isn’t nearly as much of a privacy concern. But don’t worry — it’s still got plenty of problems to go around.

The biggest one: confusion.

In eliminating the Twitterish bare-bones simplicity, Google stepped right splat into the opposite problem: dizzying complexity. At the moment, it’s not so much Google Buzz as Google “Huh?”s.

Why aren’t the incoming posts in simple chronological order, as they are on Twitter? (Answer: Because every time someone comments on an older post, it pops back up to the top.)

You can connect Buzz to Twitter. But it’s a one-way, passive link: your Twitter posts appear on Buzz — eventually — not vice versa. And there’s no Buzz-Twitter linkage of followers or replies. And connections are available to Facebook.

When you see a good Buzz post, you can e-mail it to someone. But, weirdly, you can’t pass it on to your Buzz followers (what, on Twitter, is called retweeting).

Inconsistencies and poor design choices are everywhere. For example, a new message can be Public or Private (addressed to one particular Buzzer). But you don’t have that choice when you’re responding to a post — only when you’re creating a new one.

Meanwhile, Google committed a kindergarten-level design gaffe when it put the Public and Private choices in a pop-up menu. If there are only two choices, why not make them both visible as buttons?

Sometimes, back-and-forths about a certain topic appear like the script of a play. At other times, they appear as they do in Gmail — as a collapsed set of file-folder tabs. Google says that there’s an algorithm that determines which look you get, but from your perspective, it’s just inconsistent.

Google’s recommendation system, meanwhile, tries to help you sort through the tidal wave of conversation by automatically promoting or hiding messages according to what it thinks you’ll find useful. So you may suddenly start getting messages from people you’re not actually following (because people you are following have liked it or commented on it).

Conversely, messages that Google thinks aren’t that interesting get dumped at the bottom of the page, collapsed into tabs. Unfortunately, they may include messages from your boss, best friend and lover. There’s no way to tell Buzz, “Never treat my wife that way.”

You can also do Buzz from your iPhone or Android phone (just not from regular cellphones; no length limit means no Buzzing by text message). Since these GPS phones know where you are, you can tap Nearby, and see other Buzz members on a map to see where they’re standing. (Of course, they can also see you, which is a little creepy; you can turn off this feature if you like.)

On an Android phone, like the Motorola Droid or the Nexus One, you can even see what people are saying about a particular store or restaurant that’s right across the street from you. That feature has big potential.

Then again, the whole Buzz-on-phone thing spells even more confusion. There are three different ways to get at Buzz — from buzz.google.com, Google.com, or the Google Maps app for Android — each with a different set of features. “There’s opportunity for us to improve that,” concedes a product manager.

He’s not kidding. True, at this point, you spend a disproportionate amount of your Buzz time absolutely baffled. But remember, it’s a Web site. It can be improved at any time — and Google has been making changes at an astonishing pace, even in its first week of operation. The company agrees with almost all of the criticisms you’ve just read, and says that it will address them soon.

Funny, isn’t it? It’s a running joke that Google labels many of its services as “beta” (meaning “in testing”) — and leaves that label in place for years. And here’s Buzz, a truly beta product that isn’t labeled that way.

Buzz probably won’t make much of a dent in Facebook or Twitter or Friendfeed. But because it’s nicely integrated with Gmail and Google chat, because it has powerful and flexible features and because millions of Gmail members can get in with a single click, Buzz will have its own following. In other words, its complex design is a challenge that Google will have to overcome — but it’s not enough to be a Buzzkill.

E-mail: pogue@nytimes.com.

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Jan 3, 2010

Students admitted early to college network on Facebook

University Yard at the George Washington Unive...Image via Wikipedia

By Jenna Johnson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 3, 2010; C01

The first 570 members of George Washington University's Class of 2014 found out they had been accepted one day in early December. Within hours, they began to network on Facebook -- making friends, debating dorms, discussing "Real World: Washington D.C." and organizing a Wiffle ball team.

"Let the friend requests begin lol. Congrats again guys, 2014 all the way!" a high school senior from New Jersey posted late that night. A few days later, a senior from Illinois wrote, "The senioritis has definitely begun."

College classes don't start for eight months, senior year of high school is barely half over and most deadlines for general admission still haven't hit, but students who committed to attending selective universities through early decision programs have gotten a jump on their virtual college life.

"I already have a sense of having a class of close-knit friends," said Ryan Counihan, a high school senior from Boston who turned 18 last week and received online birthday wishes from several future GWU classmates. "We definitely have a leg up. . . . We have an extra four months or so to get to know each other."

At several colleges across the country, early decision has become an online clique, an opportunity to become a leader at a school they do not yet attend. The University of Chicago Class of 2014 Facebook group proclaims: "Well, we've gotten a head start on everything else. Let's meet each other!" A group at Brown University boasts, "The rest of the masses will find out if they'll be joining us early April."

GWU has a half-dozen Class of 2014 groups on Facebook, and the largest has more than 325 members. (Anyone can join, and there is no guarantee that all members have been accepted.) Together, the students have watched the mail for their acceptance packages, compared financial aid offerings, debated the pros and cons of living in a dorm known for having a "party culture," and marveled at how cool it will be to live in the District.

"Umm we'll be in DC for the next presidential inauguration . . . WHAT," a girl from New York posted. Fourteen others hit the "like" button, and a girl from Chicago responded, "I was thinking about that today and freaked out ahhh!"

Facebook, Inc.Image via Wikipedia

And there are plans for non-virtual contact: More than 60 students in the New York area will meet this month or next, and a smaller group in Boston will do the same. A handful of Chicago students met last month.

Students who apply for early decision tend to be devoted fans of the school, said Steve Roche, director of GWU's freshman orientation program, Colonial Inauguration. And that makes them more likely to plunge into networking once they are accepted.

Being accepted into college begins the transition from high school, Roche said, and often a Facebook profile metamorphosis: Besides adding friends and joining college networks, students might remove prom photos and ditch their loyalty to the Jonas Brothers.

Going through that transition in the middle of senior year, rather than right before graduation or over the summer, can be jarring. So when students or their parents called Roche last week asking for orientation information, he gently told them: "Here's the information. But worry about your high school career. . . . It's December, heading into January. Don't forget that you have that extra semester."

But for many students, the carefully choreographed college admissions process is starting sooner in their high school careers. Early decision, which is used by competitive colleges to fill part of their freshman class months ahead of time, has become more popular in recent years.

GWU received 70 percent more early decision applications this fall than two years ago. The university is holding a second early decision round this month. The deadline for that and general admission is Jan. 10.

Occasionally, the early deciders remind each other that they aren't the only members of the Class of 2014 -- and that others will quickly join the groups they've set up. The real test of their Facebook friendships will come when they meet each other.

These days, students increasingly come to freshman orientation knowing 30 or 40 people rather than being just vaguely acquainted with their roommate from the awkward phone call in which they decide who is bringing the microwave, Roche said. Still, most of those Facebook-forged friendships won't last.

"It's good because it makes them feel more comfortable," Roche said. "Just in my experience, those friendships don't last more than a week or two into the semester."

Max Hoffman, 17, broadcast the news of his acceptance on GWU's main Facebook page but has resisted joining the Class of 2014 group, friending future classmates or replying to the guy who wants to be his roommate.

"I don't want to push the whole process," said Hoffman, who lives outside of Boston. "I want to enjoy high school."

Follow the Post's Education coverage on our Facebook fan page. Or get all the latest Education news and commentary on http://washingtonpost.com/education.

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Jul 24, 2009

Java's Ticking Time Bomb

Tom Allard, Cilacap, Central Java
July 25, 2009

HE WAS a mystery visitor dismissed by Jasmin, until last week, as a curious oddity. Every so often, a man would turn up at his next-door neighbour's house, walking briskly up to the front door. "He would always wear a motorcycle helmet all the way up to the entrance. He wouldn't take it off until he got inside," says Jasmin, a small-time farmer reclining on a bench on his front porch.

"The first time I saw him was just after Arina had her first child. I didn't think much of it, but when they found the bomb we were scared. When we heard our neighbour was a terrorist we were even more scared."

Arina Rahman is the suspected wife of Noordin Mohamad Top, the Malaysian-born terrorist who has had a leading role in suicide bombings in Indonesia stretching back to the first bombings that killed 202 people on Bali's Kuta tourist strip in 2002.

The man in the helmet was almost certainly Noordin himself, visiting the woman with whom he had two children while on the run from the biggest manhunt in Indonesian history.

For more than six years, Noordin has evaded capture. His remarkable elusiveness has, it appears, allowed him to pull off another of his signature devastating attacks.

He is the prime suspect as the mastermind of last week's audacious and meticulously planned bombings of two of Jakarta's most prestigious, and supposedly well-secured, luxury hotels.

Nine people, including the suicide bombers, died at the JW Marriott and Ritz-Carlton hotels. Among those murdered were a Dutch couple holidaying at the Ritz-Carlton, Evert Mokodompis, an Indonesian waiter whose wife gave birth to their son the day after he died, and three Australians and a New Zealander attending a breakfast meeting of Jakarta's business elite that was almost certainly targeted.

If all had gone to plan, the attacks would have caused far more carnage. Police now believe that an undetonated bomb, a laptop packed with explosives and bolts discovered in Room 1808 in the Marriott, was supposed to have gone off first, provoking a stampede of panicked guests towards the lobby, where the suicide bomber was to have then unleashed two bombs in the chaos.

The merciless killing of as many civilians as possible is the trademark of Noordin, an accountancy graduate who gravitated to a brand of violent Islamic extremism in Malaysia under the influence of the then exiled heads of Jemaah Islamiah, Indonesian clerics Abdullah Sungkar and Abu Bakar Bashir.

He fled to Indonesia in the wake of a crackdown on militants in Malaysia after the September 11 attacks.

He idolised Mukhlas, the now executed ringleader behind the first Bali bombings, and was infatuated with Osama bin Laden's jihad.

When Jemaah Islamiah's leadership, many of whom were appalled by the outcome of the first Bali bombing, decided to oppose mass-casualty attacks, Noordin struck out on his own and formed Tanzim Qaedat al-Jihad, also known as al-Qaeda for the Malay Archipelago.

"The extent of his actual communication with al-Qaeda is not clear, but he certainly seems infatuated, aping not only its name but also its materials and tactics," says Sidney Jones, the Jakarta-based terrorism analyst for the International Crisis Group.

The recently retired head of Indonesia's Detachment 88 counter-terrorism squad, Surya Darma, believes al-Qaeda was involved in last week's attacks, pointing to their sophistication, similarities with the hotel attacks in Mumbai and the requirement for significant financing.

"This kind of operation is not a domestic kind of work," Brigadier-General Darma told The Age. "This is al-Qaeda."

Whether al-Qaeda provided more than just an inspiration for the July 17 attacks remains to be seen. What is certain though, is that Indonesia has never quite seen terrorist attacks of this type before.

Most bombings in Indonesia have either focused on so-called soft targets such as Bali's bars or restaurants, with suicide bombers carrying bomb-laden packs, or used the brutal but somewhat ineffective strategy of hitting hard targets such as the Australian embassy with speeding car bombs.

In this case, the target was hard, the famously tightly secured hotels in Jakarta's upmarket business district, but the method was to use suicide bombers detonating themselves, which had, until last week, been used only for soft targets.

This was a surgical strike against foreigners and, specifically, Jakarta's elite expatriate community. The modus operandi meant that the terrorists could minimise the number of Muslim casualties and maximise the dead Westerners. Even militant Muslims baulk at the death of their fellow followers of Allah through terrorism.

Such an attack not only required recruits willing to kill themselves, but intimate knowledge of the hotel's security system. It needed intelligence on how to smuggle explosives past the metal detectors and about where and when the business meeting at which the Australians died was to be held, and an ability for the bombers to blend in with the guests at the five-star hotels.

It would have taken months of surveillance and the careful recruitment and placement of conspirators inside the hotel. In this case, it appears that a florist named Ibrahim, who had worked at the Ritz-Carlton for more than three years, was one of the insiders providing the valuable intelligence.

For Noordin — who constantly moves from one place to another, never staying anywhere for more than a few days — to have orchestrated the attacks while Indonesia's most wanted man was extraordinary.

"He must have nerves of steel to put up with it all … all the moving, all the close calls," says Greg Fealy, a former Office of National Assessments analyst now at the Australian National University. "But he endures it and he's continually planning new operations and putting together new cells."

While many Jemaah Islamiah members oppose his methods, they will still provide Noordin, reportedly a charismatic and persuasive man, with protection for a few days while he plans the next attack and opportunistically picks up new recruits as he travels.

In some cases he picks up mainstream Jemaah Islamiah members and persuades them to embrace terrorism. In another instance, he recruited individuals with a grievance against a local Christian minister converting Muslims and turned that sentiment into an all-embracing hatred of Westerners.

All the while, Noordin adheres to the strictest security arrangements. It is instructive that his wife, Arina, says she had no idea who he was, even though she was the daughter of one of his trusted operatives.

CERTAINLY, over a decade or more of jihadist activity of one type or another, Noordin has developed all the skills to put together an attack. He knows how to make bombs, source explosives, raise finances and persuade recruits to join his cause by using select passages of the Koran, arguing that Islam is under attack and must be defended at any cost and by any means.

And his ability to evade capture has enhanced his stature immeasurably.

As police investigate the mass murders at the hotels, it is in Cilacap, central Java, that they are concentrating much of their efforts. The residents of the district are hardly wealthy, but the web of villages connected by narrow roads and laneways, where locals tend rice paddies and small landholdings planted with cassava and shaded by coconut palms and banana trees, is a kind of lush Javanese rural idyll.

The homes are modest but well looked after, with many having neat hedges and patios adorned with bougainvillea. Very few women wear the hijab, and fewer still wear the chador or burqa favoured by Arina, Noordin's alleged wife.

It hardly feels like jihad central as school kids race their bikes and farmers take their produce to market.

Yet here, apparently, is Noordin's nest. Police have found a bomb identical to that used in the hotel blasts buried in the backyard of Arina's house in the village of Binangun. Her father, Baharudin, is on the run. A man alleged to have been a would-be suicide bomber trained by Noordin's group was picked up this week by police in Cilacap.

Saifuddin Zuhri, an Afghan jihad veteran and Noordin emissary who was arrested in Cilacap three weeks before the bombs went off, is believed to have been an important organiser in the long build-up to the attacks, making the seven-hour journey by train to Jakarta under the guise of having been given an all-expenses-paid scholarship to study Islam at a university there.

Jasmin, the neighbour, says Baharudin didn't interact with his neighbours. "He was at the house or the mosque. He didn't really talk with us at all, even though we have been neighbours for 20 years. We have really got to get rid of these people," he says. "They are very bad people if they did this terrorist bombing."

Jasmin's sentiments were widely shared in Cilacap, and reflect the broader sentiment across Indonesia about militant Islam.

In a country of 240 million people, it is a tiny minority of Indonesians who support mass-casualty terrorism, or are prepared to provide sanctuary for terrorists. Noordin's network of hardcore adherents is unlikely to be more than a few dozen people.

The broader JI movement that was so shockingly revealed by the first Bali bombings has all but ceased to exist, at least as a group that supports achieving an Islamic caliphate across South-East Asia by force of violence.

It has been crippled by arrests and fragmented by ideological disputes, and it is only Noordin's network that is considered to be an active exponent of terrorism, even if it continues to try to recruit from the old JI membership.

Even so, while 400 arrests of JI members shows Indonesia's success in cracking down on its terrorist wing, the fact that militant Islamic schools and preachers continue to go about their business unencumbered reveals a flaw in Indonesia's counter-terrorism strategy.

While they may not be pumping out suicide bombers and generally do not advocate the killing of civilians, they are producing graduates vulnerable to being taken the extra mile by recruiters such as Noordin.

More worryingly, members of the community seem to be prepared to provide sanctuary to mass murderers in the name of Islamic brotherhood, even if they don't approve of their actions. As Jakarta-based consultant James Van Zorge said this week: "Dangerous characters inside Jemaah Islamiah are treated with kid gloves, often with light jail sentences, and therefore given more opportunities to commit inhumane acts.

"At the same time, foreign nationals caught in minor violations of drug trafficking are left to rot in prison for the rest of their lives. Is vice a more heinous crime than cold-blooded murder?"

One of the most salient points about terrorists is perhaps the most obvious one, but one that is all too often ignored. Terrorist acts are conceived and executed to be brutal, shocking and inexplicable — in a word, terrifying — to convey an impression of a capability far greater than the actual power or support base of the organisation that undertakes them.

People are much more frightened by death that is sudden and violent than a demise that is more run-of-the-mill and less bloody. A tourist or visiting business person in Bali or Jakarta is still far more likely to meet misfortune through illness, a traffic accident or ordinary crime than to be caught up in a terrorist attack.

Yet given modern technology and relatively easy access to materials that can make bombs, it only requires 10 or so fanatics with a total lack of respect for human life and a preparedness to die to put together attacks such as those that occurred last week.

For Indonesia and its President, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, the bombings could not have happened at a more heartbreaking moment.

Basking in international praise for peaceful elections held eight days earlier, the country was being lauded for its efforts to combat Islamic extremism and the fact there had not been an attack in four years.

Indonesia's efforts to unify its often fractious ethnic groups and to make headway against the pernicious problem of corruption have also been acclaimed of late.

Its economy, for so long a basket case, has been the best performing in the region, shrugging off the global economic crisis to be on track to record growth of about 4 per cent this year.

Tourism was booming in Bali, which had just been voted the "world's best island" by the upmarket Travel + Leisure magazine.

IF THE presidential election proved anything, it was that Islamic groups held much less sway over the masses than at previous polls.

Now Indonesia runs the risk of the newfound confidence in its future being reversed as investment dries up and tourists stay away.

In this context, it is perhaps understandable that Yudhoyono, relishing the opportunity to continue the steady reforms in his newly won second term, lost his cool and launched an astonishing rant hours after the attacks that all but blamed his political rivals for the hotel bombings, accusing them of being "draculas and angels of death" intent on "destroying the peace and security of the nation".

In the days since Yudhoyono's address to the nation, police investigations have shown those accusations to be as implausible as they originally seemed.

And it may also be that the intent of the terrorists to sow fear has not had the impact that they intended.

Jakartans have defiantly continued about their business, visiting the malls that are so often mentioned as targets.

Bookings at hotels have not been hit as hard as might be expected under the circumstances.

According to the chairman of the Bali Tourism Board, Ngurah Wijaya, the cancellation rates on the tourist island where two previous attacks have occurred have been "less than 1 per cent" over the past week.

"There will be some effect from the bombings, but we believe there will be other ways to make sure there is a minimal cost," said Wijaya. "Governor Made Pastika has called on all Bali citizens to be vigilant on security.

"We know we are still the best island in the world."

Such optimism may be well placed. Unless, that is, another terrorist attack soon follows.

Tom Allard is Indonesia correspondent.

Jun 16, 2009

HOW TO: Track Iran Election with Twitter and Social Media

Source - http://mashable.com/2009/06/14/new-media-iran/

Mashable, Ben Parr, June 14 - On June 12th, Iran held its presidential elections between incumbent Ahmadinejad and rival Mousavi. The result, a landslide for Ahmadinejad, has led to violent riots across Iran, charges of voting fraud, and protests worldwide. How can you best keep up with what’s happening in real-time, and what web tools can help us make sense of the information available?

This guide breaks down the best new media sources for real-time information, photos, and videos of the Iran situation, as well as ways to organize and share it with others.

If you have suggestions for additional online news sources and tools related to the Iranian election, please do leave a comment.


1. Track Iran-related hashtags and keywords on Twitter



Iran Twitter Image

Twitter is, far and away, the best social media tool for second-by-second information on what’s happening in Iran. People on-the-ground and across the globe are chatting about every breaking update, every news item, and every story they find. However, all this chatter can be overwhelming – here are some tips to help organize the noise:

Know your hashtags: The top hashtags and keywords being used by people talking about the Iran situation are #IranElection, Ahmadinejad, Mousavi, and Tehran. Track these keywords first.

Twitter Search: You can go to the source and search Twitter for keywords.

Monitter: One of our favorite tools, Monitter goes a step beyond Twitter search and allows you to watch the Twitter conversation around keywords in real-time. Create multiple columns or even embed them with a widget. This makes it much easier to consume all the information at once.

Please note that while Twitter is the fastest source of breaking news, it’s also sometimes a source of misinformation, and has a poor signal-to-noise ratio.


2. YouTube is your ally



Everybody’s favorite social video site YouTube (YouTube) has been a central distribution medium for the Iran riots. Iranians have been posting videos nonstop of what’s happening on the ground. This really is the best way to see what’s happening without any filters.

Now, how to find the videos? We’ve picked out key YouTube accounts and search terms to track for the latest videos out of Iran:

- Iran Riots

- Associated Press YouTube Channel

- Iran Protests (sorted by newest videos)

- Irandoost09’s channel

- Iran Election 2009 (sorted by newest videos)



3. Blogs moving faster than the news


While most news sources are now picking up on the Iran situation, the blogosphere has been far quicker with news and multimedia from Iran. Thus, your best bet for organizing all of this blog chatter is via Google Blog Search. Compliment this with Google News and you’ll have a fuller picture of the situation on the ground. Google (Google)’s algorithms have already pushed Iran election stories to the top of the pile, but you can dig deeper with specific searches for the Iran Riots, Ahmadinejad and Mousavi.

Extra Note: One blog stands out for its Iran coverage: Revolutionary Road has been bringing constant updates on the Iran Riots from the front lines. We rely on citizens like these to get us news from the ground.


4. Flickr images really tell the story



Iran Riots
Image Credit: TheStyx via Flickr

The social media photo site Flickr (Flickr) is brimming with some eye-popping and gut-wrenching imagery from the ground. Beatings, protests, military photos from the election…it’s all there, in full color.

Once again, search terms like Iran Elections and Iran Riots 2009 will help you pinpoint the most relevant images.


5. Final notes


Social media comes fast, and because of that, the information can be overwhelming. Use filters and tools to help you understand what’s happening in real-time. If you’re looking for background on the situation, get yourself up-to-speed using Wikipedia (Wikipedia) (Iranian presidential elections 2009 and 2009 Iranian election protests are being constantly updated).

Finally, if you want to help bring awareness to the situation, then share! Share the videos you find via Twitter (Twitter), blog about the situation, email your friends: everybody can play a part in this new media ecosystem.

Jun 1, 2009

The Facebook Controversy in Indonesia

Posted by: Bruce Einhorn on June 01

Indonesians still seem to be talking about the suggestion by some Muslim clerics last week that the government should regulate Facebook to prevent users in Indonesia from trading gossip or accessing porn. The Jakarta Post on Saturday ran a piece by Ary Hermawan with the great headline, "Thou Shall Not Facebook." (Here's a link, via UCLA's AsiaMedia site.) Peter Gelling, writing in the Global Post, has another useful take on the story. Some eye openers: According to Gelling, Indonesia has the world's fifth-largest Facebook population, behind the U.S., Britain, France and Italy. (This despite the fact that Internet penetration in Indonesia last year was just 10.5% of the total population.) Moreover, according to Gelling, Facebook has become "the most visited website" in the country.



Luckily for Facebook, the suggestion that the Indonesian government crack down on the social networking site seems to be going nowhere. The story does highlight, though, the potential that the company has in a part of the world that often gets forgotten. In Asia, China and India are the big markets that matter. But Facebook is an also-ran in China, where local companies rule, and it's a laggard in India, too, well behind Google's Orkut. (Thanks to Thomas Crampton's blog for linking to a survey by comScore on the Indian market.) Facebook seems to have hit fertile ground in Indonesia, a market with plenty of room still to grow - objections from some religious leaders notwithstanding.

Source - http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/blog/eyeonasia/archives/2009/06/the_facebook_co.html

May 28, 2009

Bottom of the Blog Wonders

Today I began rounding out our choice of news and other gadgets which appear at the bottom of Starting Points, always after the regular postings (my originals, re-posts from others). You have to scroll down to see all these goodies. They're not just cute. They're an integral part of this blog.

So is the right sidebar, to which I also added a few more gadgets today, all designed to make your online life easier and a little more fun. (Yeah, I know some of the diverse postings here can get a little heavy.) There will many new link headers in the sidebar in coming days.

Here's a rundown of today's new sidebar gadgets:

  • Translate This Blog or Any Other Webpage (new)
  • Dictionary Help Tools (new)
  • Sidebar Search Menus (new)
  • Google Phrase Translator (new)
And here's a complete list of all that's now at the bottom, since the original posting explaining what I was doing down there has now gone into the blog's March 2009 archive:

  • Breaking News Customized for This Blog (unique, covers all areas mentioned in the blog logo)
  • BBC News (new)
  • Al Jazeera Video News (new)
  • TwitterSearch (a very easy way to get the best of Twitter fast)
  • Many Other Social Networks (new, may not yet cover your favorite)
  • Easy Wikipedia Search
  • Google Mini Search
  • Google Tools (new)
  • Search YouTube
I re-named some of these gadgets to better reflect what they do. Collectively, they're a unique set of tools which to a significant degree replace typical blog postings and facilitate net search- and-explore processes. Try out as many as you can. The learning curve is pretty flat. Play around -- you can't break anything.

May 27, 2009

Is Posterous the New TwitPic?

Image sharing via Twitter just got more complicated, or easier, depending on how you look at it. Sure we already showed you 5 ways to share images on Twitter, and suggested that Tweetphoto could rival TwitPic, but it looks as if Twitter’s most popular image sharing service is getting some healthy competition courtesy of an unexpected battler — Posterous.

Posterous? You say. Well yes. The simple site that’s great for posting anything by email has managed to sneak its way into the Twitter for photos space. The service is now announcing that no less than 11 of the most popular Twitter clients — including some of our favorites like Seesmic Desktop, Tweetie for Mac, and Twitterific — now support image uploads courtesy of Posterous.

With today’s news, Posterous has done what very few Twitter image sharing services have managed to do: get mass adoption by user-favorite Twitter clients. Even though we know that TweetDeck is missing from the list, we can’t help but be impressed by the array of mobile, web, and desktop Twitter clients that are now on the Posterous band wagon.



Interestingly enough, Posterous had the gumption to assert, in a previous blog post on the capabilities of their API, that they are indeed in direct competition with TwitPic.

Now we understand why Posterous so boldly claimed that, “We allow you to upload multiple photos and you get an image gallery. We offer the full size download of the image, or a zip file of multiple images. It posts to *your* Posterous site, which may have a custom domain and Google Analytics. And we autopost not just to Twitter, but also Facebook, Flickr, and many blogs. Oh, and TwitPic is down all the time. That’s no fun.”

Essentially by using Posterous in lieu of TwitPic, you’ll be creating a photo blog of your shared Twitter images, without sacrificing comments that can be posted as @replies or image analytics. To see what a Twitter photo blog of images posted to Posterous can look like, have a look at Rainn Wilson’s Posterous.

The full list of Twitter clients now supporting Posterous image posting is below. See any that catch your fancy, or have a Posterous wish list of your own? Leave us a comment with the details.

- Tweetie for Mac
- Seesmic Desktop for Adobe Air
- Destroy Twitter for Adobe Air
- PowerTwitter for Firefox (Firefox reviews)
- PeopleBrowsr
- Twinbox for Microsoft Outlook
- Twitterific for iPhone
- Pichirp Pro for iPhone
- Twitterville for iPhone
- Simply Tweet for iPhone
- Gravity for Nokia N60

http://mashable.com/2009/05/26/posterous-twitter/